Robert De Niro’s alarm must have finally gone off — in Stone, the actor seems more awake than he has in years. De Niro is Jack, a prison corrections officer who, abandoning all professional and common sense, foolishly screws himself by screwing Lucetta (Milla Jovovich), the wife of the cornrowed arsonist inmate Stone (Edward Norton), whose parole case he must…
This two-part tale of French gangster-showman Jacques Mesrine is as densely packed and serially rambling as a well-trafficked Wikipedia entry. Director Jean-François Richet, who whipped up not-bad mayhem in his Assault on Precinct 13 remake, devotes so much time to tallying his subject’s career milestones and highlights that any insight into the super criminal falls by the wayside. Mesrine’s jaw-dropping…
Discretely drawn and elegantly photographed, Mademoiselle Chambon gives a French, working-class love triangle the Brief Encounter treatment. With long, steadfast takes and portraiture framing, director Stéphane Brizé creates an atmosphere that cradles the delicate connection developing between her main characters, a bricklayer named Jean (Vincent Lindon) and his young son’s teacher, Mlle. Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain). The fact that the two…
As suggested by its title, Allen Ginsberg’s game-changing poem “Howl” is essentially performative — so is Howl, the Sundance-opening quasi-biographical movie by Oscar-winning documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Howl the movie not only touches on Ginsberg’s early life (and successful coming-out) but also dramatizes the poem’s obscenity trial, the talk of San Francisco in late 1957. It’s broadly played…
For the past half-decade, Romain Duris has been French cinema’s go-to brooder. Diversifying his saturnine handsomeness, Duris gives his artfully disheveled mop and permanent three-day stubble a workout in the hopped-up Heartbreaker, which puts the “antic” in romantic comedy. The film’s premise has a certain twisted chivalrous charm. Alex (Duris), aided by his sister and her husband, is paid to…
Life is wonderful, death is wow, chance is weird, and Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter is a puddle of tepid ick. Is America’s last cowboy icon prospecting for more Oscar gold? He takes for his map an original screenplay by British docu-dramatist Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon). Multiple story lines cross international borders to mix personal tragedy with post-9/11 existential terror. Hereafter…
Fat Feeder is ordering more shots, and this time, when he presses the plastic cup of Crown Royal into my hand, I can’t say no. All around me, people have thrown bundles of wood into burning trash cans without removing the plastic wrapping. Rancid black smoke fills the air, accompanied by an AC/DC tribute band’s version of “Hell’s Bells.” Everything…
There’s a road-weary troubadour for each generation. But who among the current crop of young, raspy-voiced roots singers — Deer Tick, William Elliott Whitmore and Ryan Bingham, to name three — will earn the title? Ryan Bingham certainly has the history to back up his croon. The singer and songwriter was raised in West Texas and worked as a ranch…
When Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ debut album, Up From Below, emerged in July 2009, its cinematic, hippie jangle-pop didn’t seem a likely fit for alt-rock-skewing local radio station KRBZ 96.5 (the Buzz). But in these progressive times, the whistling, foot-stomping strains of “Home” have begun making their way over the station’s airwaves more than even, um, Blood Sugar…
Despite a long career littered with mixtapes and hard-earned underground fans, Curren$y is best-known for something he missed. In 2007, just as Lil Wayne was becoming the most popular rapper in the world , Curren$y left Cash Money Records rather than staying on a label headed toward immense fame. After that, the New Orleans rapper kicked around the underground for…
Listen just once to Free Energy’s radio single, “Bang Pop.” That’s all it takes for the refrain to lodge itself in your brain for six hours or so. The band’s glam boogie is full of the bad-beer fizz of which teenage dreams should be made. The cover of Free Energy’s debut release, Stuck on Nothing, shows a gigantic high-top Converse,…
The lucky 30 people who were able to procure a copy of CVLTS’ Black Hole, Hi Five cassette before it sold out are in possession of a stellar album. CVLTS hasn’t existed for a full year yet, but it has managed to attract the attention of a French record label during its short duration. The band features Josh Thomas of…
Anybody with a synthesizer, a computer and a little cord can make a bedroom synth-pop album, which is why most of them are so shitty. When you hear a good one — especially one made locally — it’s like discovering that you dig the new Staind song or something (read: unexpected, to say the least). Such is the case with…
Backfire BBQ in Wyandotte County may be the only place in town whose menu potentially could be used as a deadly weapon. The two thin, brushed-steel plates that serve as a cover for this restaurant’s listing of available dishes could, with very little effort, be transformed into guillotine blades or a samurai sword. And I think I would prefer to…
She is a magpielike accumulator of the materials she reshapes into her art. Nine times in the past five years, Buenos Aires native Ana Maria Hernando traveled to a remote Peruvian village called Mollomarca, where she once noticed glimpses of hemline color under the skirts of dancing women. Hernando was seeing handmade, crocheted petticoats. She began buying the beautifully crafted…
Two years ago, Robert Jenkins bought a house near Sterling Avenue. The home was in foreclosure, which might explain what he spent for it: $41,000, in cash, for a postwar ranch like thousands of others that dot Kansas City, Missouri. Jenkins, who works as a dispatcher, lives in the house with his girlfriend, her mother and two of his grandkids….
%{}% Sam Brownback hates the federal health-care reform. No surprise there. Hell, he even prayed against it with nutbag preacher Lou Engle. But this might surprise some — OK, probably none. Brownback may not know what he’s talking about. The good folks at the Kansas Health Institute picked apart Brownback’s claims and found his claims to be “misleading or inaccurate…
Lew Perkins’ stink won’t be coming off the University of Kansas any time soon. KU’s now former athletic director has a November 16 date with the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission, which will be the deciders in the mystery of Lew and the $15,000 exercise equipment. Perkins, in a moment of transparency, asked for the review. Now he’s facing a new…
If you watch any type of local television, you’re likely getting as sick as I am of the political ads. There’s not a political commercial that I hate more than the one with Roy Blunt busting out his blue jeans (I’m guess they’re a new pair of Wranglers) and playing border patrol. Blunt wants you to know that he’ll fight…
Where’s the beef? There’s no sign on the entrance to Chefburger announcing that it’s closed, but the view through the glass door tells a different story: mail and outdated newspapers scattered on the ground, nary a person — or a burger — to be seen. The phone, which goes directly to voice mail, is still in service, but doesn’t…
Sueko the chimp, during his interview with Plog. On Tuesday, when a chimpanzee terrorized a southeast Kansas City neighborhood — turning over trash cans, jumping on a police car, and delighting local TV news producers by doing it all within view of video cameras — the immediate question everyone was asking was: “Is this real?” It’s a natural question,…
Jim Rome knock-off Nick Wright wants to be able to sit in his box at the coliseum and wave a perfumed hankie as football players, the gladiators of modern times, ferociously hurl themselves at each other. Wright, a host at 610-AM, made callous comments after a violent weekend in the NFL. Wright talked about the most recent spate of brain-rattling…
%{}% Chef Ted Habiger’s all about teaching. Wednesdays are chef-restaurateur Ted Habiger’s official day off, but shortly after dropping his 3-year-old son Kincaid at preschool, he drives over to Gordon Parks Elementary School at 3715 Wyoming to teach a culinary class. Today’s lesson? A harvest salad. Habiger, 40, is the co-owner — with chef Andy Sloan — of the…
